Regex… and "economy of accuracy" (Regular Expressions – Part 2)

In Regular Expressions – Part 1 I wrote a summary of where regular expressions could be used in SDL Trados Studio, and I covered a couple of examples.  I also referred to RegexBuddy quite a lot as this is a really useful tool in helping you write and understand regular expressions.  But in case learning another application is something you don’t want to do I thought it would be handy to go through what I think are the most useful applications of regular expressions for every day use in SDL Trados Studio, and also share a few tips on how to use Studio to verify the expressions are finding what you need as well as introduce a little “economy of accuracy“.
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Regular Expressions – Part 1

Regular Expressions, often referred to as Regex, are something that come up again and again in forums, roadshows and the occasional questions.  So I thought it might be useful to take a better look at them and how they can be useful for translators.  To begin with I’m republishing a blog article I wrote a year or so ago on a different site so I can build on this theme in one location.
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Making the most of your resources… and some free extras

Updated 15 January 2015 : Only 10,000 TUs are required for the generation of an AutoSuggest dictionary with Studio 2014.
I’ve been talking to a Freelance Translator in Canada over the last few weeks who purchased Studio 2011.  She has a great set of resources from many years of translating, all split up in different sublanguages to cater for en(US), en(GB) and fr(FR), fr(CA) variations.  What she didn’t have was consolidated Translation Memories so she could maximise her leverage from all of these variations, or Autosuggest dictionaries, or termbases and didn’t use the AutoText lists.
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Did you know you can export Studio comments in your target Word file?

*** Please note that this feature was temporarily disabled in the update to Studio 2011 SP2.  But it is back in Studio 2014.***
If you found this ability to export comments into the target file useful I’d be very pleased to hear in the comments to this article.

Exporting Comments

Another nice addition to Studio 2011 is the ability to include comments in your target file when translating word files.
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What's all the fuss about "edit source"?

Update: 15 January 2015
This is now possible for all file formats except for ITD, updated in Studio 2014.
SDL Trados Studio 2011 SP2 has introduced “edit source”… but only for Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint file formats at the moment.  For Freelance Translators this is a welcome addition because it has been one of the most heavily voted for ideas on the SDL Ideas site.  However, is this enough and why haven’t SDL introduced this before?  This is fast becoming a topic for much debate on the public forums and Facebook pages so I thought it warranted a little insight into the problems of introducing “edit source”.
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There's more than one way to skin a CAT

Updated: 14 January 2015
Today SDL is all about SDL Language Cloud and not BeGlobal, but I hope the article is still as relevant today.  There are more ways to look at how you use Machine Translation so if you’re interested take a look at these two more recent articles as well.
The ins and outs of AutoSuggest
Language Cloud… word-counts… best practice?
The title of this post could be quite tricky to translate in many languages because not everyone uses the expression in the same way, and certainly don’t use the same words.  I chose this especially because I thought I’d write a little about using Machine Translation in SDL Trados Studio.
I’m not going to talk about properly trained Machine Translation engines such as SDL BeGlobal, which can be configured and improved to provide remarkably good translations in a short period of time for very large numbers of words… so achieving economies of scale that would be unthinkable with human resources alone.  Instead, I’m going to talk about how a Translator can make use of the growing number of Machine Translation resources in a way that might make sense for them.
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Creating a TM from a Termbase, or Glossary, in SDL Trados Studio

Update : 21 Dec 2015
This article is pretty old now… still interesting, but pretty old.  I think if you are looking for help on how to do this then take a look at the Glossary Converter from the SDL OpenExchange (now RWS AppStore) which can convert a termbase to TMX with a drag and drop!  There are a few recent articles on this tool now, like these:
Glossaries made easy…
Great news for terminology exchange
And you also have a Bilingual Excel filetype in Studio 2015 as opposed to the CSV option.
In the last week or two this question of how to create a Translation Memory from a glossary, or termbase exported to Excel has arisen a few times.  There have also been some interesting and clever responses… but notably not the easiest one.
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